Eating the Underworld (29 page)

Anniversary

A
LL THE TIME
I
WAS GOING
through chemotherapy, Afterwards was the country I dreamed about. It was the place I'd seen countless times on TV; it had different locations, different vistas, but the scene was always the same. The athlete surfaces at the end of the winning lap of the pool; breaks through the ribbon on the marathon track; completes the perfect, daring dive; comes dripping, panting, sweating, back to the cheers of the crowd; the cooling drink; the caring hands; the hugs; the flowers; the walk on down from the podium into happy ever after. I knew exactly what it would be like.

Such a shame the rest of the universe didn't.

It is seven months since I finished chemotherapy. The avalanche of hopes thwarted, dreams blocked, paths dead-ended—and all the other clichés that trip so tritely off the page and so crushingly into real life—has continued. It has done more than continue. It has overtaken the Energiser Bunny. It feels unrelenting, unstoppable and overwhelming.

Halfway through the year, in a kind of dazzle of disbelief at the sheer flood of bad luck, I wonder whether I am just imagining it. Have I become so fragile, so sensitive that even a tiny tap feels like a knock-down blow? Is my delicate mindset exaggerating the frequency with which plans turn sour?

I sit down and write a list, complete with dates, of the important things that have gone awry over this last six months. It is a long list. I show it to a friend. ‘It's not normal, is it?' I say. ‘It's not normal to have so many things go wrong and keep on going wrong?' She
looks at the list and blanches. The avalanche continues.

Am I causing this? I wonder. Am I somehow sabotaging events and people around me? I look at the list again. I decide that if I was able to cause this degree of controlled disaster, I would already be dictator of the world. They literally are events that are out of my hands. That, in a way, is the most horrifying part of it all. An internal saboteur, I can accept; a world which seems to delight in thwarting me at every turn, I don't understand.

I spend the year hauling myself up, collapsing in a teary heap, hauling myself up, collapsing, and so on. It is taking every ounce of energy and strength that I have. The six-year-old statistician at the back of my mind is dismayed. This is not the way the universe is supposed to work. I've ploughed my way through cancer, I'm due for a break. I've had my tough time, now I'm supposed to have my good time. I'm not supposed to be met with this torrent of blockages and disappointments. I am confused, angry, sad and despairing—usually all at once. This is the time no-one tells you about. I have walked into the wrong story.

In the right story, I was supposed to fight my way through the setback of cancer recurrence. To put in the hard work of it, the slog of it. To dare it, defy it, transcend it—to simply
get through
it. Then I was supposed to go home. Really go home. The home of the Monopoly board, where you get $200 just for the achievement of getting there; the home where good is rewarded and effort recognised; the home that soldiers
dream of and that never really exists.

Life is shaking me by the neck and making me give up the last vestige of my favourite illusion. It's the one I drank in with fairytales and refused to give up. It's the one that most of us, even as adults, have held onto in some secret part of ourselves. It's the one about life being fair.

And I am so angry about this. I feel like the toddler who has been denied some promised reward, shrieking, ‘It's not fair! It's not fair!' It's not fair that I went through all this, did the right thing and got thumped on the head. It's not fair! I've been cheated!

And I also feel guilty. Here am I wailing about fairness, when many of my early friends from my internet group are already dead. How dare I, the survivor, have a tantrum about life being unfair?

But I am. And I continue to. Alternated with guilt. Alternated with deep, deep sadness as I begin to count the costs of the war, the losses strewn over the battlefield, the devastation. This is the mourning I thought I wasn't going to have.

It's tricky, mourning as a survivor. Your losses are minor compared to those who didn't survive. How self-centred, to focus on your damage when there is far greater wreckage all around. And there is a strange intertwining of luck and loss. How ungrateful to be mourning losses when you should be rejoicing that you're alive? The strictures go on and on and the guilt that they produce makes mourning a difficult negotiation. Because there
are
real losses. And they need to be acknowledged and honoured, not denied.

Throughout the months of chemotherapy, I have been a highwire walker, my beam, a slender plank, suspended, quivering, above a chasm. I have adopted the principles of air walking—don't look down, one foot in front of the other, concentrate on where you're going. How else can you make such a crossing?

I have stepped off the beam now onto the relative safety of the small, high-up platform. I can afford to look down. And the view is terrifying. I thought the platform would be a place of rest and comfort. It is indeed safer than the beam. But on the beam, I focused only on the solid plank in front of me. Here I can see what I have been crossing. It is spread out beneath me. I don't know whether I can get down or whether there is still more to cross over.

When Martin and I were out driving once, we encountered a towering monolith smack in the middle of nowhere—an electricity generation plant. The engineer in Martin was immediately aroused. There is no engineer to arouse in me. My only flicker of interest in engineering occurred when I discovered that within the engineering faculty at Melbourne University was the enchantingly named Department of Power. I wondered briefly about whether there was a Professor of Power and what he would look like and then my millisecond flirtation with the world of engineering faded and died. So I am not as wildly enthusiastic as Martin at the prospect of exploring this building. Nevertheless, I get out of the car and follow him up.

And up. We are in a small elevator which is creaking
slowly upwards to the full, formidable height of the building. Finally it stops. The door opens and we step out onto a landing. And freeze. In front of us is a floor. But it is a floor made of rigid steel mesh. It is tough, strong and presumably perfectly safe. But I will not step foot on it. You can see right through it. I am up, twelve storeys high and I can see, with absolute shivering clarity, the depth of the fall; the sheer, terrible drop of breath-wrenching nothingness, right underneath my feet.

The mesh is spread from one wall to another, like a lace floor. Its loops are three centimetres wide, a foot could never go through them, but all I can see is the gap—the black mouth of the fall, winking between each interlocked, tensile thread. A part of me is telling myself that it is safe; that the mesh is strong and will hold me. Every other part of me is recoiling and screaming: No! No! Danger! Don't go! I feel, insanely, that if I step out onto the mesh—no matter how slowly I go, how much care I take—some part of me will slip right through it.

I can see now that I have been walking this wire floor my whole life. We all have. It has been disguised though, to make it seem solid, safe. The gap cannot be seen, nor the fall. It has taken cancer to make it visible. And now that I know what I am walking on, nothing feels the same anymore.

I am mourning for my old self who didn't know this; who assumed that the future stretched out as far as she wanted it to; for the self who was fit and strong and could work an intense, ten-hour day and dance for
three hours after it. I am mourning for the illusions stripped away, the idealism, the betrayals, the hurts.

I am mourning too, for the sense of separation. Although I inhabit the same physical space as my friends, the emotional space is very different. To my friends and the people around me, I have returned from a journey. I have hung up my coat and hat and come back to my normal life. I am working, playing, doing what I usually do—ergo, I am the same. I went out and I came back. End of story. What they cannot see is that I have come back a different person.

What they also do not understand is the continuing presence of uncertainty in my life. They have confused the illness with the treatment. To them, the treatment is over therefore the illness is over. When people discover I have had cancer, the first thing they ask is, ‘But you're alright now?' And I know what they need me to say. ‘Yes, I'm fine now. It's all gone.'

But I don't know that it's all gone. I thought it was all gone once before and I was wrong. There are blood tests and check-ups to remind me for the rest of my life. There isn't a date when I can pass the finishing line, have someone pat me on the back, hand me a certificate and say, ‘You're cured.'

And a certain portion of the world has definite ideas about it being not ‘all gone'. I discover that I can't get travel insurance in the automatic way I used to; I've been a cancer patient, not a good risk. Ditto for any other kind of insurance. They're not willing to bet on it being ‘all gone'.

I need to find how to live between the bland denial
of risk and the terrible staring into the chasm. I need to reconstruct the solidity of my world, but I cannot do that until I recognise what has been taken away.

I strive to remember the feeling of luck I had at the beginning of all this, but it's hard to assimilate this now; as if what was given has been taken away. I had the luck to fall into the ninety-five percent survivor's staging. I had the bad luck to fall into the five percent who have a recurrence. What does it mean?

And what I am most terrified it means is that the universe is chaotic. That there
is
no meaning. No order. No story.

I alternately plod and drag myself through the year. I set magical goal posts. New Year is coming up; that will bring a fresh start, new luck. And when it doesn't, I set my sights on this event and that. My birthday. An anniversary. I am like a failed millennium prophet, blindly flailing around for new signposts.

And then finally, a holiday. We're going north, to the sun. This must be it. This must herald the new beginning, I decide. But two days after we leave, a sobbing phone call from Amantha tells me that our beloved Tabatha was suddenly taken ill and died during the night.

Reindeer are normally wary, skittish beasts, ever alert to the presence of human or other danger. In the remote Arctic winter, however, during the time of deepest cold, an odd thing happens. Reindeer can be seen wandering around in a state of strange, unnatural docility, seemingly unafraid of people. The syndrome has a name. It is called ‘arctic resignation'.

I think of it now as I doggedly put one foot in front of the other, having learned not to look back and not to look forwards.

The battering continues. I stop waiting for the universe to right itself. I am terrified that I have lost my story.

What happened to the Giant's wife? It was something Rachel had never thought about before. Not once. She had shivered in anticipation of the Giant's approaching ‘Fee Fi Fo Fum …' and had cheered with Jack as he scrambled down the beanstalk clutching the hen and its golden eggs. But not once had she thought about the Giant's wife.

Rachel thought about her now. When Jack arrived, the Giant's wife had been going about her simple, daily business, taking care of things, taking care of people. She might have been in the kitchen, cooking apples, leaf-green in their skins or polishing the copper pans, her reflection flickering in and out like a runaway moon. Rachel imagined her moving slowly, her giant hands delicate as she went about her work. Dreaming to herself, in the steamy trance that is the heart of all kitchens. The Giant's wife was a background character, a supporting role, her
function merely to protect and shelter Jack. Who would be interested in her?

Rachel looked up her childhood copy of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk'. She thought that she remembered it, but she knew that there was always more than what you remembered and that what you remembered was always more than what there was.

Rachel's memory was of Jack, a simple but well-mannered boy living with his widowed, impoverished mother. Down to an empty larder, she sent Jack to sell their last possession, a cow. On his way to the market, Jack was intercepted by an unscrupulous trader who preyed on his naivety and fobbed him off with a handful of beans in exchange for the cow. His frustrated mother threw the beans out of the window when Jack returned with neither cow nor money.

In the morning, Jack looked out of the window and saw an enormous beanstalk. It led to a magical land, wherein he found the house of the Giant. The Giant's kindly wife took him in and gave him food and a hiding place when the Giant unexpectedly returned. In exchange, Jack stole the Giant's silver and gold and his two most treasured possessions—a magic hen which laid golden eggs, and a harp, which played without being touched.

It took Jack three trips up the beanstalk to carry out these thefts. On the third trip, he was discovered and chased by the Giant. Jack hacked through the beanstalk and the Giant fell to his death.

It seemed a simple story: daring, valour and a victory over a vicious enemy. But now, Rachel could see that
there was something missing. Now that she had started to think about the Giant's wife.

It seemed to Rachel that the Giant's wife was the entirely innocent victim in this piece. She had shown Jack kindness and generosity; he had rewarded her not only with theft, but by killing her husband. How did this make sense? How could this be tolerated? Rachel felt agitated as she thought about it. She had to find out more.

The Giant's wife reminded Rachel of her mother, she thought. Rachel remembered her mother also in the kitchen—cleaning, baking, taking care of people. The other place Rachel remembered her mother was in the garden. Not gardening; although plants grew for her mother in the way that the beanstalk had grown for Jack; but sun-bathing. Sometimes Rachel's mother would stretch out her towel on the springy backyard grass and lie motionless, utterly still—a golden flower in the sun.

Rachel liked to remember these times; her mother, eyes closed, dreaming her own dreams, or drowsily talking to Rachel as she sat near or passed by. As her mother drew in the sunshine, gratefully, greedily, Rachel thought it was the only time she had seen her mother take anything for herself first.

Rachel found the original ‘Jack and the Beanstalk' in the library stacks. It was an English story, dated 1820. She read it slowly. It was darker, more complex than the childhood story of her memory.

In this story, Jack was a selfish, over-indulged child who had wasted away all that his widowed mother possessed. Finally, driven to the edge, she admonished him;
he had brought her to penury in her old age. She had to sell the cow, she could not see Jack starve.

When Jack returned from the sale with only a handful of beans, his mother's despair and pain finally erupted. In a rage, she threw the beans out of the window.

Having climbed the beanstalk, Jack found himself in a strange barren land with no living creature to be seen. Fatigued and hungry, he walked on, hoping for somewhere that he might beg a drink.

Just as he felt doomed to die, a stranger approached in the distance. A beautiful woman with a wand of gold—a fairy—who asked how he had come here and whether he recollected his father. Jack's father: the secret in the family; the subject his mother avoided.

The fairy would tell Jack his history on one condition: Jack must solemnly promise to do what the fairy commanded. If he disobeyed, she would destroy him. Jack agreed.

Jack's father, the fairy said, was a man of such goodness and benevolence that he never let a day pass without an act of kindness to some person. The talk of his goodness floated over the land until it reached the ears of the Giant, who was as wicked as Jack's father was good. The Giant was envious, covetous and cruel, but had the art of concealing those vices.

The Giant came to Jack's father with lies of hardship. He was invited to live in the family household. In return for this kindness, he murdered Jack's father, sparing the son's and mother's lives only on the condition that the crime was never mentioned and that Jack's mother would never inform him of who his father was. He then plundered the
dead man's treasures and burnt his house to the ground.

The fairy had been Jack's father's guardian, and she had failed in her duty. She was now bent on avenging the past and punishing the Giant; Jack would be her instrument. He was to make off with the Giant's possessions, particularly the two magic creations—the hen and harp—which the Giant had stolen from the fairy.

The rest of the story was as Rachel had remembered it, with the exception of the Giant's wife. Rachel had imagined her as the archetypal kitchen-mother, comfortable and comforting, in harmony with house and husband. Instead she found a beaten wife, terrified of her partner, of the violence that flared and raged around the house. It was a house in which live victims chained in cages awaited the Giant's voracious appetite. And in this house, a woman who, through fearful obedience, had assisted in the murder of Jack's father; a woman, nevertheless, of ‘a compassionate and generous nature'. This was the woman who took in a starving boy, fed him and protected him from her husband and the terrors of the house.

As Rachel read, she saw that the characters in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk' could be divided into two groups—the givers and the takers. It was as simple as that.

Jack, the fairy, and of course the Giant, were the takers. They served their own interests, their own needs were foremost. On the other side were the givers: Jack's mother, the Giant's wife, and most of all, Jack's father. There was a terrible symmetry to it all. If you laid them out on a graph, the Giant would be at one tail and Jack's father would be at the other. Both tails ended in death.
And somewhere in between, Rachel knew, was the answer to the question rippling through the story.

Rachel could understand the Giant. He was evil, he had committed terrible crimes without remorse, it was right that he should die. That was what fairytales did—they punished evil and rewarded good. The Giant's wife had been rewarded for her kindness; released by the Giant's death she was freed from a tyrant.

But what of Jack's father, the man who was generous and charitable, who gave and kept on giving even to the unseen evil he had allowed into his house? He was murdered, his possessions looted, his name rubbed out, his story hidden, even from his son. Jack's father was the true mystery, the enigma at the heart of the story. The real question was, what had happened to Jack's father?

Rachel understood givers. Her mother had had everything ripped away from her in the camps—her family, her friends, her dreams—all gone without reason, without sense. Yet her mother, who had had so much taken away from her, was still a giver. In the camps, she took care of those who were sicker than herself. She shared her food. She shared her strength. She survived.

In the new land, as far across the world as water would take her, Rachel's mother continued to give—kindnesses, comforts, practical acts—to friends, neighbours, shopkeepers, strangers. But most of all to her two daughters. Like a gardener whose orchards have been ripped away by storms, she had built a hot-house for the two green shoots that had unbelievably grown out of chaos. The storm was never talked about. Only the preciousness of the two new lives.

As she grew up, Rachel had friends who were only children. Wistfully, they would confess to Rachel that they had always wanted a sister. Rachel did too. She didn't know what she had, but most of the time she knew it wasn't a sister.

As an adult, Rachel would understand that her sister had never forgiven her for simply being there. As a child, however, the only explanation she could come to for her sister's behaviour was that there must be something wrong with her, Rachel.

Rachel tried continuously, did whatever she could to determine what it was that her sister wanted of her. But like the cuckoo, there was room for only one in the nest.

Occasionally, glimpses of this truth would filter through to the younger Rachel. She would turn away from her sibling. When this happened, her sister would become charming, placating, seducing Rachel back to the game.

Throughout all this, Rachel realised that her parents were as powerless to help her as she was to help herself. She understood, without even knowing that she understood, that the reason they could not intervene was because they could not allow themselves to see.

Jack's father, the story said, was a man whose life was devoted to giving—to caring for the poor, to nourishing those who had fallen in the world. He must have known about evil, about shadow. That was why he had dedicated his life to light. He had created the shelter of his mansion and invited in the destitute, the suffering. The house could fold its arms around them. The world with its
despair was out there. It could not enter. He would not allow it to.

And yet he must have understood that evil is everywhere, no respecter of houses, walls or frontiers. Perhaps he had seen too much of evil? thought Rachel. How else to explain his blindness? Rachel knew that if you stared at a single colour long enough then closed your eyes, you would see only its opposite, the colour opposed to it in the spectrum; as if the retina, flooded with the one colour, was overwhelmed, overcome.

Jack's father was like the overwhelmed eye, unseeing when the Giant, fuelled by envy and rage, crossed his defended, invisible borders that were not really borders after all.

Rachel remembered the horrors that her mother had lived through; the nightmare juggernaut that had left her bruised and bleeding on the road but somehow, miraculously alive. Her mother had fled to the furthest reaches of the world. But once you knew that death could come out of clear skies—the glance of a neighbour, the voice of a friend, the heart of your ordinary world—how could you ever forget? And how could you ever remember?

How desperate the need for sanctuaries, those places where darkness could not enter. They must be created, had to be created, even if they could not be created. And yet in creating them you lost a part of yourself, became blind. The act of seeing, Rachel thought, encompassed both the seen and the seer. Whatever you were blind to also blotted out a part of you. Like the sun in eclipse, slowly giving up bite after bite of itself to the small encroaching moon.

She remembered her mother in the face of her sister's tempers. Not attacking back or defending herself, but simply standing, resigned and patient as a cart-horse. And Rachel's heart nearly broke. She knew her mother had been as powerless in this as Rachel; just as undefended from what lay here in the heart of the sanctuary.

But you had to defend yourself, thought Rachel, that was the key. It was there in the story. And before you could defend yourself, you had to see. To really see. Not just what was easy or nice, or what you wanted to. You had to be prepared to see it all.

That was what had saved Jack's mother and the Giant's wife. They had started off as appendages, with not even names of their own. They existed only to serve the needs of Jack and the Giant. They nourished, they toiled, they gave of themselves. And yet, in the end, each of them had finally rebelled. Jack's mother had finally cried out in rage and pain at her son's selfishness and thrown the beans out of the window. The Giant's wife had at last defied him, hiding Jack from his violent appetites. And it was these two acts of defiance that had not only saved the two women but also carried the story. Without them, there would have been no beanstalk, no entrance to the secret heritage—the blotted-out memory of the father's name—and no Jack to avenge his father's slayer.

Rachel, too, had finally had to save herself. She had had the choice, she realised, to drown or to disentangle herself and swim. Finally she had chosen to swim.

There was no sanctuary, she thought. It was a mythical creation. There was no place where darkness could not enter. Darkness and light were a part of each other's
definition; one could not exist without the other. Like the serpent which symbolises both healing and death; wisdom and forbidden knowledge; the loss of one skin, the birth of another.

The body understood that, thought Rachel. It lived with death; indeed, it was only death that allowed it to live. Cells died that others might flourish. If they stopped dying, the body's life was in peril. There was no sentimentality in the body. It took in its world, sorted it, used what it could, expelled what it could not. Air, food, water, transformed in its dark, acidic cauldrons. It was the body of night, of darkness, the tough-minded god of the underworld, weighing souls, passing judgement, exalting, discarding.

And yet, it was also the body of the imagination, of light—the delicate rods and cones of vision, flickering in their enchanted, viscous sea; the Lazarus chemicals of memory; the electric house of love. Earth, water, fire, air—the molecules, simple, complex, base, raw. Lightness and dark, the body took them in, took them all in—clear-eyed, pragmatic, ruthless—and created the tender, shining miracle of world.